DELPHI, Ind. — Defense attorneys want a judge to restrict important evidence that investigators say links a Delphi man to the murders of two teenage girls.
Attorneys for Richard Allen have filed a “motion in limine regarding ballistics,” which is a pretrial motion asking that certain ballistics evidence be excluded from trial.
Allen is charged in the murders of Abby Williams and Libby German, who were found dead in a wooded area near Delphi’s Monon High Bridge in February 2017.
According to a probable cause affidavit, investigators found a .40 caliber unspent round at the crime scene between the girls’ bodies. Years later, as police focused their investigation on Allen, they found a gun inside the suspect’s home as they served a search warrant. When Indiana State Police analyzed that gun at their crime lab in late 2022, they determined the unspent round located at the murder scene had cycled through Allen’s gun, according to court documents. A week later, Allen was arrested and charged with two counts of murder.
Allen’s attorneys described the state’s evidence as “flimsy,” and they raised serious questions about the science used to establish a possible link between Allen’s gun and the unspent round found at the crime scene.
“The probable cause affidavit seems to suggest that a single magic bullet is proof of (Richard Allen’s) guilt. It is a bit premature to engage in any detailed discussions regarding the veracity of this evidence until more discovery is received, but it is safe to say that the discipline of tool-mark identification (ballistics) is anything but a science. The entire discipline has been under attack in courtrooms across this country as being unreliable and lacking any scientific validity,” defense attorneys Brad Rozzi and Andrew Baldwin wrote in December, just before a judge issued a gag order in the murder case. “We anticipate a vigorous legal and factual challenge to any claims by the prosecution as to the reliability of its conclusions concerning the single magic bullet.”
With Tuesday’s court filing, that challenge is now underway.
13 Investigates discovered the filed motion listed on Indiana’s court access website. While the online filing is visible to the public and media, access to the actual motion is currently sealed from public view. That means we do not yet know if the court is being asked to exclude some of the state’s ballistics evidence or all of it.
Either way, if Judge Frances Gull grants the request and rules that some or all of the ballistics evidence is inadmissible, it could have a major impact on the outcome of Allen’s trial.
Allen, who has been in custody at Indiana prisons since his arrest last October, will be back in court Thursday as Gull considers several other motions that have been filed by both the state and the defense. At Thursday’s hearing, the judge is also expected to set a trial date.
13News will be in court Thursday and will report any new developments throughout the day.